Olexei I. Motrunich

Professor of Theoretical Physics

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Olexei Motrunich

I am a condensed matter theorist interested in topological phases and gapless fractionalized phases. I have been fascinated with dual approaches thinking in terms of topological defects such as vortices in superfluids or easy-plane magnets, hedgehogs in spin systems, domain walls in easy-axis magnets, and monopoles in quantum electrodynamics, and these ideas have been very fruitful in studies of topological phases. I have also been interested in gapless fractionalized phases, including gapless spin liquids, Bose-metals, and non-Fermi liquid phases. For my PhD, I worked on quantum systems with strong randomness, including infinite-disorder fixed point in the quantum Ising model in two dimensions as well as free-fermion localization problems with particle-hole-like symmetries in one and two dimensions.